1332 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



For has not this theory — of society disintegrated into its Individuals 

 (with its unseen consequence, of these becoming more or less "dust 

 of the State" accordingly) — characterised industry and economics, 

 with their resultant politics ever since: and correspondingly has it 

 not been a main dissolvent of the family? So, in a single image, 

 Rousseau more or less put us all into the foundling hospital; and 

 Eugenics is the foremost example of a really scientific endeavour to 

 get us out of it. How so? By its recall of us to our families again, 

 and to kin and kind once more. And this now more fully than even 

 of old; since with conjugal choice and responsibility shown as 

 deeper and more sacred than even law, morals, and religion had 

 realised before. Thus also towards soul as weU as body increasingly 

 protected or purified from all such deep taints as those Rousseau 

 confessed as personal, but which the Freudians are now tracing, 

 first in their city cliniques, but thence throughout human life; and 

 yet more searchingly than have even confessors of sins and theo- 

 logians of original sin, both separately and together. Eugenics thus 

 calls for renewal of family responsibilities, which our present parental 

 dependence on our State schools, or yet more on artificial orphan- 

 ages as Public Schools, can no longer so lightly absolve us from. 



Are the gains through liberation of the individual then to be 

 sacrificed ? On the contrary, developed ; and even beyond Rousseau's 

 hopes and dreams. For now each individual is seen as of yet more 

 significance than he knew, since not only as complex life-product of 

 the past, but as a potential creator of the future. His ancestry is 

 full of significance; and his very presence in life to-day is evidence 

 of the predominance of many good survival-values maintained, 

 despite whatever ancestral and even personal limitations, or taints 

 of evil. These may — indeed, now only too frequently do — make him 

 if not even wholly unsuitable, at best less desirable than others for 

 our now realised responsibility to the society of the next generation, 

 and coming ones, as one of their ancestors: and if so, there is no 

 denying hard fate here ; and this even to segregation in the extremer 

 cases. 



Yet that is not the only possibility of selective restraint. Since 

 the war, our nearest neighbours, as its greatest sufferers, pass 

 commonly the rueful saying: "Every Frenchman is ready to die 

 for his country, but he does not know how to live for it!" But the 

 eugenist is obviously ready, and with not a few fundamental ele- 

 ments, towards the needed answer. There have long been evidences 

 of arousal to the importance of the population question in France, 

 and though so far especially as regards quantity, yet with beginnings 

 towards quality too; so the great opportunity of eugenic selection 

 among the nearly two million foreign immigrants since the war 

 has not been wholly missed, though too little utilised. American and 

 other immigration laws also show endeavours towards eugenic 



